Let’s say you need to do mobile application development for both the Android operating system and iOS. What is the best software development approach?

You might develop two native applications. Taking advantage of native APIs and OS-specific programming languages can help you build a powerful app. Most enterprise apps, especially ones that require substantial application programming interface (API) traffic, benefit from native development.

If you decide to develop native applications one at a time, you’ll likely want to begin with Android, for some of the same reasons that independent app developers often focus on Android. You’ll probably have better luck developing the full application as an MVP on Android and then converting and optimizing it to iOS after release.

You will still need to debug and rewrite the code for the native language and redesign the front-end user interface, because the two operating systems function differently, making cross-platform operation impossible.

So why not start completely from scratch? While you can’t translate the code into a new programming language, much of the back end can be replicated cross-platform. Frameworks, libraries and third-party extensions often function identically in both environments, allowing you to avoid costly reworking. You can also use a prebuilt mobile cloud service, such as IBM Mobile Foundation, to manage the web back end.

Another option is to go hybrid, taking a write-once-run-anywhere approach. Hybrid apps use a single codebase that can function on either platform. They’re typically coded in a programming language that’s universally recognized, such as Java, JavaScript, HTML or CSS. Because you’re denied access to the operating system’s native APIs, hybrid mobile application development works best for simple web applications, three- or four-page mobile applications with limited functions.